


Silence

by eyeofxana



Category: The Umbrella Academy (TV)
Genre: Adopted Sibling Relationship, Gen, Introspection, One Shot, Sisters
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-13
Updated: 2020-02-13
Packaged: 2021-02-28 07:02:09
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 732
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22689700
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/eyeofxana/pseuds/eyeofxana
Summary: Allison and Vanya never knew how to talk to each other.But they're listening. Maybe for the first time, they're listening.
Relationships: Allison Hargreeves & Vanya Hargreeves
Comments: 6
Kudos: 32





	Silence

There’s a ragged pain pulsing in Allison’s throat, and it feels like screaming.

It feels like Vanya’s screams.

Luther is a wall in her way, and no one is helping. They don’t know how to listen to empty spaces when there are easier things to hear. And Allison is exhausted, and frustrated, and hurt, but mostly she’s just sorry. Sorry for the life she’s built, a life so irreversibly fabricated that she couldn’t change it without sending the whole thing crashing down. Sorry for how powerful she used to feel, and how that’s left her now. Sorry she wasn’t stronger. Now, most of all.

Sorry the scene before her ever had to play out.

She shoves at Luther until her knees give out. Vanya is screaming against the glass and Allison feels a snarl of her own rising in her throat, knows it will be silenced the same way. She and Vanya, they’re mirrored, two silent sisters who just can’t reach each other. They’ve never had the strength. And now the world is going dark at the edges, pulling and blurring into broad, disorienting shapes, and Allison knows she’s about to fail again. She’s finally listening, and she still isn’t strong enough.

Luther is gentle as he guides her away, but his every touch burns. Allison looks back one last time, sees _I’m sorry_ in the desperate shape of Vanya’s mouth, feels it reflected, magnified, in herself. And behind it, between it, she hears what Vanya couldn’t accept before, what Allison always feared would never come to her on its own. Her sister is so startlingly her mirror image. All she can do, weak as she is, is hope Vanya sees her, as clearly and suddenly as she sees Vanya.

_I hear you. I’m listening._

The space between them sings with silence, and every note of it is _I love you_.

* * *

There’s a steady hum of pain in Vanya’s throat, the phantom ache of screaming.

It won’t let her forget.

She _burns_ when she thinks of it. The desperation clawing at her chest. The apologies that dissolved into nothing as soon as they left her mouth, the footsteps she couldn’t even hear as they melted into the dark. Hurt scorches her throat, sharp as a knife, as a bow—and the thought is so visceral that she doesn’t speak, hasn’t said a word since—since—

And then her eyes catch on Allison. Even with the white bandage glaring out from her throat, even after all the blood loss, her sister is still so beautiful. And Vanya almost took that from her. Almost took everything.

Part of her had meant it. It all happened so fast—but in the back of her mind, part of her had wanted to cut away the power that had cut away at her first. She’d made Allison just as powerless, as muted, as she once was, and part of Vanya—an uncontrollable, simmering rage she can neither extinguish nor forgive—must have really _wanted_ it. Now Allison will never star in another movie, never do another interview; will never even be able to tell her own daughter she loves her. Will never say those words to Vanya ever again, either. And maybe no one else ever will.

She couldn’t believe them, before. Couldn’t trust the place they came from. But maybe it was words themselves she couldn’t believe. Words turned to daggers on her page, made a prison of her mind, cast an inescapable dusk over her all her life. It was words she could never trust, not when some held such weight while her own were never heard. The way Allison smiles now, wholehearted, radiant, is a symphony, as beautiful and as loud and as sure as she’s ever been. And Vanya is listening. Maybe for the first time, she’s listening.

Later, with her brothers held before her in an unvoiced indictment, she’ll sense something behind her and remember that moment: two sisters, mirrored in their silence, so clear to each other that the rest of the world just fell away. Vanya felt it there, then, and she thinks Allison did too. It was in eyes, and in the soundless set of lips; in the determination to push forward, in the resolve to stay still. It said, _I see you_. It said, _I hear you. I’m listening._

It was _I love you_ , and it was silence.


End file.
